"Never mind, pet. I'll do it ever so quietly after dinner." She did not reply. "Are you ready?" he asked. "Come back to the fire, and sit down. There's so much to tell each other about, isn't there?" She moved to the door acquiescently and switched out the light, he following. A savoury smell crept through the chinks of the kitchen door, with the all-pervasiveness of cookery in flats. He sniffed it. "How familiar! But you don't do the cooking now?" "No; I only help, sometimes. Ann's a treasure." "What do we pay her?" "Thirty pounds a year." "Whew!" She cast a sidelong glance at him. "A domestic drudge is worth it, I assure you; women have been consistently underrated." "But fool work like cleaning saucepans and helping with the kids--" "Shutting oneself up with the sink; working early; working late; breathing ashes and dust and grease; keeping tolerably civil and cheerful over it ... that's the job we're speaking of. I ought to know all about it," she said in a low voice, as if to herself. She sat in her corner of the chesterfield and took up her knitting. He sat down, too, by her, all at once alert, surveying the flying movements of her dear hands; hands as tender and white as ever he remembered them. "Oh come!" he said in affectionate but uneasy remonstrance, "you don't look much as if you'd been shut up with the sink, working early and working late." "You forget I've had a whole year's holiday." She kept her eyes on her work, as if re-casting that first year upon her busy needles. "At least," she reflected, almost as if to herself, "part of the time was only half-holiday; but the last six months have been wonderful." Jealousy rose in Osborn; jealousy of he knew not what. Something or someone had brought colour and smiles to her, and it was not himself. As he began to suggest that fact to himself, before he could do more than begin: "How, do you mean--?" the door opened, and the maid announced: "Dinner is served, ma'am." Marie sprang up and put her hand kindly in his arm. "Come along," she said. "We have all your favourite things, so I hope you're hungry." CHAPTER XXII PLAIN DEALING Re-entering the dining-room Osborn was struck by its comfort and charm. It was a room humanised by the hand of a kind and clever woman. And how well-ordered his table was! How nice his silver looked! How well his wife looked! What good cooking he could command! And in what attractively comfortable circumstances he now found himself after that year which had ended by palling; that year in which he had done as other men--free men! There was no place like home, for permanence; no woman like the wife of one's choice, for permanence. These were the things which mattered.